More Than Just a School Project
by Luna Creevey
Summary: When she first writes to her Beauxbatons correspondence partner Dom Weasley reckons she'll just write a couple times. But to her surprise she really likes Darcy and they soon become great friends, telling each other all about their lives that year.
1. A magazine for weirdo's

Dear Darcelle Duponte,

Hi! I'm Dominique Gabrielle Weasley, your 'Cultural Magic Scheme' letter sending partner. As you can see I have a French name which is because my mother Fleur Weasley (formerly Delacour) is French and went to your school, Beauxbatons. Unfortunately I know hardly any French, just a choicy selection of swear words that my mum likes to use when she is annoyed at us, dad or just generally anything. Just tell me to simplify myself if my English is getting too hard to understand!

I'm not sure what I'm meant to be writing about because the point of the exchange is for me to tell you about my culture. I may as well start with telling you about myself. My friends call me Dom, and as for my appearance I've attached a picture for you of me last year when I was going through a bit of a rebellious phase. Don't worry; I don't usually have purple hair and that many piercings!

I'm in the Slytherin house and if you've heard anything about us then just clear those nasty little prejudices out of your head. We don't poison first years, kill baby unicorns or systematically hospitalise every member of the Gryffindor Quidditch team, so don't believe any of the rumours that you hear. Sorry about the rant, my cousin James is always winding me up about how protective I am of my house. If you haven't heard anything about my house you must think I'm as bonkers as a Quibbler subscriber (a British wizarding magazine filled with wacky conspiracy theories and imaginary animals). If you don't know Slytherin is meant to be a house for evil megalomaniacs who want to take over the world. But that was years ago and as we're fortunately running a bit short on power-crazed loonies Slytherin has started taking nice, normal people whose families used to be sorted into other houses like me and my cousins Al (Albus) and Lucy.

Lucy, Al and I are best friends along with Fraze (Fraser) Wood and Em (Ember) Nott. As you can tell we have a thing about shortening names! Fraser's parents were in Gryffindor, in fact his dad used to captain my Uncle Harry, but Fraser has now come over to the 'dark side'. He's funny, friendly and Scottish (he has the funniest accent and we're always winding him up about it).He's also incredibly tall so he's the one who always ends up rescuing Em's cat from all manner of strange places like last week when Jordan (the cat is called Jordan, Em used to have a massive crush on Lee Jordan, the international Quidditch commentator) managed to get to the top of the Womping Willow. Poor Fraze is still in the hospital wing and has a month of detentions to look forward to for what Headmistress McGonagall calls "intentionally idiotic and reckless behaviour".

Em's family has always been in our house so she's our only real 'hereditary' Slytherin. She is a bit mad sometimes as she gets very hyper on the seemingly harmless kiddie wizarding sweet _Sugar Quills_ which are very easily smuggled into lessons because they look exactly like normal quills (except you can't get hyper by sucking on normal quills _obviously_). Currently her hair is dyed red, brown, blonde and black (we're only allowed 'natural' hair colours but Em has got round this by pointing out that even though her hair is streaky with four different colours they are all natural, even though the occurrence of all four in her hair isn't).

An actual quality of a Slytherin is being cunning and if we go by this then my cousin Fred should be in our house, I have never seen someone who can conceal a prank so well that nobody realises until the last moment that they are about to be humiliated. Another Slytherin trait is being ambitious and if we go by this then my cousin Molly should be in our house because I have never seen someone who so very much wants to be Head of the Department of Mysteries even if it is a mystery to her and the rest of us how she should go about achieving this.

So you see most of my family _should_ be in Slytherin and we're not just the black sheep, in fact I'm pretty certain that everyone has a bit of Slytherin in them. You might have realised that by now I have mentioned five of my cousins which is a bit unnatural. The reason for that is that Hogwarts is pretty much populated by my family. If you stand up at a table in the great hall and holler "Oi, Weasley!" (which Alanna Fleming has tried once to get the attention of one of her Quidditch team, my cousin Hugo) then you receive the confused and irritated looks of many ,generally, red-haired freckly students wondering why you have interrupted their meal.

Most of my family is ginger and freckly although I'm not. One Christmas when I was eleven I felt so left out that I nicked some hair dye from Victoire (she likes to experiment with her hair colour) and dyed it ginger. It turned out a hideous tangerine colour and at the time everyone was very sympathetic because I was hysterical. But as soon as I looked like I might not break down into sobbing, gasping tears at the slightest mocking comment James and Fred (partners in crime, despite the slight age gap) lunged in and started winding me up about it. They both still call me Gingy, even though that's the one hair colour I won't be trying again EVER. Overall I have ten cousins (nine on the Weasley side and Aunt Gabby's little girl Nathalie) and one honorary cousin Teddy who's Uncle Harry's godson.

I'm in fifth year which means I'm taking my O.W.L's (ordinary wizarding levels) this year. The reason why we're doing this letter exchange is because one of the subjects I'm taking is Cultural Magic/Muggle Studies (they combined them to make the subject accessible to muggles because there wasn't enough interest in Muggle Studies and Headmistress McGonagall didn't want the subject 'dying out'). I'm meant to be learning from you all about Beauxbatons, French customs and foreign spells and charms. You're meant to be learning from me right? For your yearlong 'la magie des autres' project (at least I think that's what Prof. Richardson called it)?

Fat lot of use I'm probably being. All I've really told you about is a magazine for weirdo's, dying out prejudices and my eleven year old self's humiliation. I hope you don't think I'm completely barmy and you actually reply. Sorry about being useless, it's a habit of mine.

Yours in apology,

Dom 'Gingy' Weasley

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**A/N: Thank-you for reading and please review. If you are wondering what the picture Dom sent Darcelle is then here is the link to the picture I imagine it being on deviantart: ****.com/?qh=§ion=&q=dom+weasley#/d2wve1h****. Next chapter is Darcelle's reply.**


	2. A justifiable tantrum

Dear Dom 'Gingy' Weasley,

Hi! I'm Darcelle Adrianne Duponte. If you look up the name meanings for that you'll find that it means (for each one in order) Fortress Dark Bridge. Cheerful, huh? Sorry if I sound a bit threatening but I have to get this over with first: Do NOT ever, ever, _ever _call me Darcelle. Why I hear you ask? Because it is the most girly, prissy, fairytale, fancy name in the history of the world and I hate it, that's why.

Don't you think your name should reflect who you are as a person? Like the horrible people should be called Lucifer and the girly people should be called Penelope and the down-to-earth no-nonsense people should be called stuff like Darren, Matt and Dave. Well that's what I think it should be like and that's why I hate my name, because it isn't like me.

Just so you know what I'm really like (warts and all) and not some warped image I made up of myself to make me sound amazing I asked some people around the Academy to describe me in five words. Here are the (some not so complimentary) results:

Chloe Mesquine: Arrogant, messy, rowdy, geeky, annoying (We've never liked each other, but I think you might have guessed that by yourself)

Camille (Cami) Joly: Stubborn, untidy, funny, intelligent, bonkers (Introducing Cami, my best friend and all round extraordinaire)

Madame. Fontaine: Hard-working, intellectual, satirical, unorganised, unique (Ok, I admit it was a little sly of me to ask my favourite teacher, as I _know_ I'm her favourite pupil)

So there you are I think that pretty accurately describes me so you kn- Oh, dragon dung... I knew I'd forgotten something! I am _such_ a nargle-head. Here I am prattling on in fluent (I should hope) English without telling you how on earth I can speak it. To tell the truth I don't regard myself as being French, which was why I was so happy about this project. Now before you go thinking I'm some delusional Frenchie who harbours a wild ambition to be British, let me explain. I was born and brought up in England and educated there until I was eleven.

My parents are both French but I thought of myself as British, at school it was not unheard of for a person to have both parents of a different nationality. So when my mum told me she was sending me to Beauxbatons the conversation went a bit like this (from my crummy memory):

"Darcelle, darleeng-" She stares beseechingly at me as if already trying to persuade me.

"Darcy, mum, Darcy. You should know that by now." She obstinately refuses to use the name I prefer.

"Well, as you know, you are to be starting secondary school next year, and I do not weesh for you to go to this Hogwarts place."

"BUT, MUUUUM!" I believe I had a right to whine. I had been dreaming of Hogwarts for a while and I could practically see it: teeming with life, magic, ghosts, students, house-elves and so many secrets that they would take more than a life time to investigate. She had just smashed my dreams into tiny, weeny little pieces.

"Oui, oui but I vant you to go to Beauxbatons, it is a lovely place your father and I, ve adored our time there."

At this point I stormed upstairs and refused to even discuss the matter of my schooling until two days before I was due to start first year, at which point I realised any further efforts to persuade my parents away from Beauxbatons were futile. There is a reason why even my best friend Cami describes me as 'stubborn'. So they stayed in England working in their positions in the International Magical Cooperation Department in the Ministry of Magic and I was sent to France.

Now my parents didn't just send me away to a foreign country without any experience. Mum and dad nearly always spoke French around the house and consequently I can speak both languages just as fluently. I picked up a lot of French history and politics from my dad's discussions and my mum's insistence to have the wireless permanently tuned to _Radio France _made it impossible not to pick up France's quidditch news, wizarding rock and trends.

Now I realise I probably sound like a stroppy, self-righteous and tedious pile of niffler droppings right now. I can't blame you, if you're thinking that because that's what I'm thinking about myself right now as well. I'm kinda dire at writing letters, but if you persevere I might become more bearable.

In Beauxbatons we have four forms in a year (they're random we don't have houses like you) they are: B,E,A and U (yes, the first four letters of our school name, aren't our teachers dazzlingly original? *note the sarcasm*). I'm currently in 5B (fifth year) and there are two other girls and three boys in the form.

There's me, Cami and Lucie Peureux in the B's girls dormitory. Cami has been my best friend since I started BB (we call it that because frankly, going around saying Beauxbatons Academy the whole time is a major pain) and she's really sweet. She says hi to everyone she sees in the corridors if she knows them and is always complimenting other people charm work, defensive spells and potion craft.

However that courtesy doesn't extend to me. She seems to see it as her duty to constructively yet harshly criticise everything I do when it comes to school work. She says it's called "The art of taking Darcy's ego down a peg", I'm not sure if my ego existed to begin with but now after five years of Cami I'm positively certain there isn't a trace of it left.

She's always teasing me about my accent (honestly I feel an empathy with your friend Fraze) because apparently my French pronunciation isn't up to much and I still sound British. I'm making her sound really horrible, trust me she's not. She has a fab sense of humour and after a couple of hours in her company your mouth muscles ache. She says I'm just as funny as her when I can be bothered to crack a joke but truthfully I don't believe her, I'm not sure it's humanly possible to be as funny as Cami.

Lucie Peureux is quiet and she hardly ever talks to me and Cami because she's nearly always out in the school grounds with Eridanus Goldsoul who asks that we call him Danny, I can't blame him being called Eridanus sucks _almos_t as much as being called Darcelle. It's obvious that Lucie fancies him to bits but Danny's completely oblivious, as far as he's concerned she's the genderless best friend who comes looking for snorkacks with him. I'm not kidding. That's what they do in the academy grounds. They look for crumple-horned snorkacks. They obviously haven't read Luna Lovegood-Scamander's newest bestseller: _Some things just don't exist_.

The boys in our form are all wild extremes of each other. We have Marc Dubois, possibly the cutest (in the hot way) guy in existence. He's something like a quarter veela (I am SO jealous of veela descendants) and he has this swishy blond hair that sits just right over his vivid cobalt eyes (I'm sounding like one of Celestina Warbeck's more appalling songs now aren't I?). His skin doesn't have a single blemish and he's perfectly tanned. Actually now I think about it he looks a bit like those dreamy surfer guys you see in pictures for American surf resorts.

Then we have Herbert Bourdaine, who's massively nerdy and is amazing at every subject (Cami says "Not as good as you though Darcy." until she remembers she's trying to bring _down_ my ego). Then of course we have Danny, who I've already told you about.

I'm sorry I couldn't send you a picture as I don't have any of myself. I have an aversion to having my picture taken because I don't like my appearance. I'm really really short with brown hair that I keep in a bob. That's all you really need to know. I'm sorry I took so long to reply, I was described as 'unorganised' for a reason.

My weird greetings go out to you,

Darcy Duponte

PS. You're no barmier than I am. Although I doubt that's a comfort.

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**A/N: This chapter is for ShyUnicorn because if it wasn't for her review this chapter wouldn't exist. I don't like writing Darcy as much as Dom, she's harder to write. I love reviews, I don't mind anonymous ones, but if they're signed I can send you my huggles. I forgot last chapter so...**

**Disclaimer: Tengo nada**


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